(This is Part 5 of a series. Go back to Part 4.)
2. Perverse incentives (the second source)
Perverse incentives account for a good deal of the "evil" or negativity that the human race experiences. A perverse incentive is something that creates an incentive that is quite different from the incentive intended. An example:
The U.S. National Prohibition Act came into being in January of 1920 and lasted for 13 years. Its high-minded purpose was to lower society's crime and drunkenness by forbidding the manufacture, sale and/or distribution of alcohol. Interestingly, it had exactly the opposite effect.
Alcohol consumption did indeed go down for the first year because of drastically reduced supply. After that, the public turned to gangsters to run the risks of supplying it with forbidden alcohol. Gangsters, in turn, were greatly attracted to the business because of the enormous profit incentives created.
In sum, an unintended but huge incentive was created for gangsters to band together and organize in order to supply the vast sums of alcohol desired by the public. Thus, the consensus among sociologists is that the primary effect of Prohibition was the rise and financing of organized crime.
Moreover, because of the rise of organized crime, serious crime increased by 24%. Homocides increased by 78%. Federal convicts rose by 561%. Meanwhile, arrests for drunkenness rose 41%. Arrests for drunken driving rose by 81%. Deaths from poisoned liquor increased by 290%. Thus was society "benefitted".
Another effect of Prohibition was that the public turned increasingly from beer to hard liquor—a result that has continued to this day. Since hard liquor contained much more alcohol in a smaller volume it was easier to secretly transport and distribute. Thus hard liquor became more available than beer and the public developed a taste for it.
According to a number of sociologists, a strong clue that the prohibition of alcohol would probably create perverse incentives was that it was outlawing a victimless crime,
or to put it another way, it was outlawing a "crime" where the victim and the perpetrator are the same person.
Another example: When our prototypes lived in the trees for 50 million years or so, our bodies naturally evolved to prefer calorie-dense foods as a means of obtaining the most energy for the least effort. Thus we preferentially sought out sweet fruits at 300 calories per pound.
Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom share this tendency. Experiments have shown that chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, etc. will preferentially choose fruit—
if it's available—over vegetables such as cucumbers or celery. They naturally go for the greater caloric-density.
Fast forward to today. Now we're faced with choices never faced by our ancestors in the jungle: Chocolate cake, french fries, hamburgers, ice cream, crispy chicken, pastries, potato chips and so on with caloric densities ranging from 800 to 2500 calories per pound. Livestock raised to contain fat levels three to four times the fat levels of animals in the wild.
These foods, which did not exist in nature, have created
a perverse incentive for us. Our natural inclination to seek out calorie-dense foods now tempts us to eat high-fat, super high-calorie foods that are directly linked in many nutritional studies to the obesity and degenerative diseases so prevalent now in industrialised societies.
Would we like to see "evil"? Just go to the hospital and witness the many humans in agonizing suffering from the effects of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, strokes, arthritis and so on. Yet these "evils" are not caused by Satan or a malevolent deity or whatever.
Rather, they are mostly related to the perverse incentives created by our own human ingenuity in creating more and more tempting super calorie-dense foods.
The best antidote to this kind of "evil" is the cultivation of our knowledge and discernment in recognizing when an action will create (or has created) a perverse incentive at the personal, tribal, institutional, societal or governmental level—and taking a different path.
Generally, this involves taking actions (perhaps remedial actions) that are closer to nature—such as a more natural diet—or that do not involve going against human nature.
(This is the end of Part 5. Go to Part 6.)
—jim sloman, 4.4.05
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